I hear often that it is more effective to spend money in the for-profit market than go to some particularly ineffective non-profits. After some searching, there doesn't seem to be any known reference value for this, despite how much I hear it.

 Particularly, I am asking about the counterfactual value of a small amount of money, especially on the scale of the whole economy. There's clearly a lot of value to having the economy, but a marginal addition seems proportionally much less.

It could be possible that this is never true, if money flows back into the for-profit economy at the same rate, but I doubt this, as a significant amount of money does not flow back into the economy ever.